


when did this just become a mortal home

by Cirkne



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: First Kiss, M/M, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Pining, Swearing, Wingfic, the others are mentioned - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-25
Updated: 2018-01-25
Packaged: 2019-03-09 11:43:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13480770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cirkne/pseuds/Cirkne
Summary: The pain feels almost like it’s supposed to be there.orStanley wakes up with wings one day.





	when did this just become a mortal home

So maybe the anger never goes away. The hurt does, sure and the fear hides itself somewhere so deep he can almost pretend it’s gone but the anger stays just underneath his skin. So close to tasting air. The fight or flight response morphs into the flight _then_ fight response. The punchline of the joke is that he’s only ever fighting with himself and he’s so angry now. 

So his feet are wet to just above his ankles and his shoes are starting to feel like all they’re doing is weighing him down and in ten years the only thing he’ll remember about this place is how much he hates it. 

He dreams of it, too. Dreams of running and never being fast enough and there’s irony in that he guesses or maybe there’s not. This is just how it is and how it will always be. He is not meant to escape.

And they all have their things now. Their cigarettes and their books and holding onto each other like they’ll drown if they let go and sneaking out at two in the morning to drive outside the walls of Derry just because they can and their college applications and all the places they’ll visit once they leave for good. Stanley keeps picking at his skin, biting at his fingers, pulling at his hair. 

And this new pain, this constant ache he feels deep in his body is probably his new thing. If he could find all the threads connecting everything that happened to them maybe this would make sense. Maybe it wouldn’t. He doesn’t know anymore. His body no longer feels like it’s his. There’s nothing new in that. It just sits. Nothing will ever be okay again and so-

And so it feels like someone rearranged his bones and now they can’t find the way they fit and at night he dreams of turning into a fucked up skeleton in a grave both too big and too small for him. 

“That’s weird, Stan,” Beverly says when he finally tells them but she doesn’t sound like she thinks it is. There’s probably a reason for all of it. For the way she holds her cigarettes and the way she talks and the way Stanley’s body keeps hurting, the way his spine feels like it’s going to break soon. When he lifts his head, Richie is looking at him, toying, as he often does, with the pendant he’s wearing. It’s not unusual but it is strange. 

“What?” he asks, fixes the collar of his shirt.

“Your mom,” Richie shrugs, casual, goes back to whatever magazine he was reading. They don’t talk about it further. Him and his bones. They’ve seen worse.

Later, Richie offers to walk him home. He’s never done it before, not since they were fourteen and too afraid of their own town to walk alone and Stanley turns to look through the window in Bill’s kitchen. The sun hasn’t even started to set.

“No,” he says, licks his lips. “I can get there on my own.”

Richie keeps his eyes on him. There’s something else he wants to say, Stanley can tell. 

“Suit yourself,” he goes for eventually, turns away from Stanley to walk back to the kitchen. There was probably something else he wanted here besides talking to Stanley but he leaves empty handed. Something hangs in the air, between them, like it usually does. It feels like maybe it’s bigger this time. Closer to the surface but Stanley can’t figure it out yet and maybe he isn’t trying hard enough but he’s tired and his body has been hurting for weeks and everything feels vaguely out of place. He thinks of the last time he felt like this and traces the scar on his palm. Maybe there’s something about growing up that makes weird things happen. He’s too exhausted to let himself wonder.

He walks home in a quiet protest against the others treating him like he’s fragile somehow. The pain isn’t that much worse than when they were thirteen. His scars itch and he bites down on the inside of his cheek. There’s music coming from one of the houses he passes. The sky looks like it’s going to rain. His body, like all those years ago, feels like it isn’t his.

His mother, curled up on the couch in the living room, asks why he’s home so early but she doesn’t seem interested, just like she knows she’s supposed to ask. The TV is playing a movie Stanley knows she’s already seen.

“I’m tired,” he tells her and then climbs the stairs to his bedroom before she asks anything else. Falls asleep before it gets dark. 

*

Richie’s leaning into him, saying:

“Fuck, I wanna go swimming,” more like he’s talking to himself than to any of them. 

“It’s way too cold for that,” Eddie tells him. Richie closes his eyes. There’s something there, again. Stanley wonders when it will start getting clearer. Richie’s still leaning into him and he’s-

He falls just in the middle of everything Stanley knows and everything he cannot explain. He’s real and he’s solid and he’s _here_ and yet it feels like there’s something between him and everyone else. He’s a performer and they’re watching him as intently as they can and the lights are illuminating his face and it feels like they can almost see him behind the character but then the curtain falls and they never get to see him break. He never forgets his lines, never stumbles. Stanley keeps watching him. 

“One by one the bright birds leave,” Richie sings.

The curtain won’t stop falling.

*

It stops hurting but then there are-

He feels like he should have known, somehow. Like in retrospect this makes sense. He freaks out for exactly two minutes before he calls Mike. Mike’s the smartest person he knows. That’s probably not true but he’s the smartest person he knows that he also trusts and so he calls Mike. 

“Hey,” Mike answers. Stanley’s trying not to hit anything. Through the window at the end of the hall, he can see the light grey of the sky. The feathers, in the dim light of the hallway leading to his room look light grey too. _I could blend in_ his mind tries but there’s no logic in that and Stanley has always been the rational thinker. Maybe, if he tries, he can pull them back inside. There’s something in that thought that makes him taste iron. _I could blend in_ his mind offers again, like a pleading. None of this makes sense.

“I have wings,” he says when he’s been quiet for too long because there’s no reason to be subtle. There’s no _way_ to be subtle, really. Mike hums on the other side of the phone. Hums. Hums. Hums. There’s something about it. Stanley bites the inside of his cheek.

“Right,” Mike says, slowly. Something about this feels like it’s already happened. A weird deja vu for strange conversations on the phone. Maybe it did. He’s not sure of anything anymore. “Right,” Mike repeats. His breathing doesn’t change.

“Right,” Stanley echoes. “If my parents come home-” he starts but doesn’t finish because he doesn’t know what would happen, exactly. They’d probably ignore it, he thinks, the way they did so many times before and Mike knows that too but there are things they allow each other to forget.

“Yeah,” Mike says, hums again. “Can you- I don’t know. Hide them?” 

"I can try," Stanley says. He's been trying not to look at them, a desperate attempt to pretend they're not there but he can feel them, the same way he can feels his arms or legs. The same way- 

He doesn’t know. There’s nothing to compare this too. Grey smudges in his peripheral vision. Moving, slightly, almost like they’re alive. There's a moment before he realizes Mike is waiting for him to do it and then he clears his throat for no reason and tries. 

They go back easier than he thought and he feels strangely small suddenly as if this isn't the body he's had for the last eighteen years and then the pain returns and he thinks, again, he should have seen this coming. He told them, then, that it felt like his bones had been rearranged but this probably makes more sense. There's no place in his body for _wings_ and so they're pushing against everything else there is. Or maybe there’s no place in his body for anything _but_ wings.

"Stanley," Mike says and he had almost forgotten he was on the phone. "Did it work?"

"Yeah," he says and then thinks Mike is going to tell him that they just solved the problem, so "Hurts like hell, though." And that’s true, yes but there’s something else there. He feels caged in, suddenly. A flightless bird. A flightless-

Human. He’s a human. There are no other options. Not his body with wings. Wings and then a body. Separate. One of those belongs to him.

"Library? In like half an hour?" Mike suggests and Stanley wants to ask: _that's all you can think of?_ but it's not like he can think of anything better or like Mike is supposed to know how to help him with this. _Wings_ and no threads to grab at.

"Okay," He says, to Mike but also to himself. Waits a really long time after Mike hangs up to move. When he does, it feels like his body is trying to betray him or like he's trying to betray his body. Neither of those are good. Neither of those-

The pain feels almost like it’s supposed to be there. It’s making home in his body and it’s kicking him out because there’s only so much space in there.

When he gets there, Mike's waiting for him at the top of the library stairs, hands in his pockets. Stanley was almost expecting him to look different, proof it's not just his body that’s doing this. Maybe they’re all changing, in some way. Maybe he’s getting there faster.

Mike looks the same, though. He wore the same blue sweater last week when they all went out to see a movie and Stanley kept shifting in his chair because the pain kept getting worse. It doesn’t feel like it could get worse now. It’s almost muted, it seems. The roots have already embedded themselves in his insides. He’s been here before.

As he climbs up the stairs to greet Mike, he imagines the way the wings grew inside his body and then he imagines the way they broke through his skin while he was sleeping. Winces to himself. 

"I was definitely still expecting to see wings," Mike tells him just before Stanley reaches him, turns his head to the side. "Now I'm almost sure this is a prank."

"I _wish_ ," Stanley answers out of all the things he could say to make Mike believe him. It’s worrying how willing they are to trust each other about things like this. Stanley fixes his shirt and follows Mike into the library. 

There's something about it that feels, almost, like it exists somewhere outside of Derry. The building stands, of course, right in the middle of town but once the doors shut behind you it doesn't feel like you know where you are anymore. 

The lady at the desk only lifts her head for a moment before going back to her crossword puzzle. She knows them. She's known them since they were thirteen and checking out books about supernatural entities and the history of Derry. She probably thinks all seven of them are horror fans. Fans of the unnatural. Fans of finding what lies beneath their reality. He wishes they weren’t.

Mike finds the sci-fi section and Stanley swallows.

"Are we doing research in the _made up_ section?" he asks and Mike turns to look at him. Blinks but doesn't say: _What did you expect?_ and Stanley sighs, runs a hand down his neck. "Yeah this makes sense," he mutters. Mike starts looking for a book to start with. Stanley wonders if it's possible to ignore pain your entire life without losing your mind. Maybe everything that happened before was a practice round. 

*

"It's probably bad for you to keep them hidden for so long," Mike says, putting the last book in his backpack. They made a list of every sci-fi book about wings and they’re checking out the first ten because, of course, there’s a limit and because Stanley thinks he’ll start crying if he takes the books home and has to look at how many there are. He gave the list to Mike. It’s longer than he feels it should be and he keeps thinking about how this will probably take months before it starts making sense to them. If it ever does at all.

As they’re walking out of the library, he feels strangely like he should have an answer. Like he should say: _no, actually, it's fine because_ and then he'd give Mike a reason and Mike would nod at him and they’d part ways and read everything at home. Except they wouldn't need the books because he'd already know what to do because in some way the wings make sense to him, he just doesn’t know what to do now or if there’s anything he’s _supposed_ to do or if this has anything to do with him at all or if there’s something bigger somewhere.

“Stanley,” Mike says, gentle, too aware of Stanley spiraling. “You should let them breathe when you can,” in that voice he and Bill both have and Eddie, sometimes, like they know better than you. It makes Stanley annoyed more than anything most times but he just sighs now, feels desperate and tired.

“Do you want to see them?” he asks because he doesn’t want to go home yet but he also doesn’t think he can do anything without thinking about this and Mike clears his throat but then decides against whatever he was going to say, nods. 

They go to the quarry because that’s the only place they can think of where people wouldn’t see them. Or, well, that’s what Mike says. Stanley is half too focused on making the pain stop and half too tired to care about other people seeing. He thinks they’d probably just ignore it anyway, the way they ignore everything in this awful town.

Mike sits on a rock they’ve sat on a thousand times before and Stanley realizes he doesn’t know what to do. 

“Um,” he says. “They showed up on their own this morning I don’t know how to- you know. This is new to me.” He feels awkward standing like this, too aware of his body.

“Take off your shirt, you don’t want to rip it,” Mike offers him, easily and Stanley swallows. He doesn’t like the helplessness of not knowing your own body. 

He’s not big on taking his shirt off or nervously fiddling with the hem of it while one of his best friends watches him like he’s a zoo animal or something. And he is, now. They could definitely put him in a zoo. Or one of those freak circuses. His breath catches in his throat when he thinks that and Mike says:

“You don’t have to show me,” soft, patient. Maybe too patient. They shouldn’t have grown up like this. “It probably feels personal like showing your guts or I don’t know, something.”

“I’d let you see my guts,” Stanley answers instinctively because he would, because it doesn’t feel fair that there are parts of him his best friends haven’t seen yet when he’s been trying to fit himself between them for years. Mike snorts to the left of him.

“Okay, weirdo,” he says but he sounds fond and Stanley pulls his shirt off of himself as fast as he can, before the moment passes and then as soon as his body can tell that it’s allowed now, the wings show up. They look different in natural light, Stanley realizes. Darker than he thought. Bigger, too, not constricted by the walls of his house and Mike says “Woah,” in an almost childlike way.

“Yeah,” Stanley answers, he can feel that, too, a sort of wonder, moves to wrap them around himself. It’s strange, the way they both listen to him and do whatever they want. The pain is gone now, too. Almost feels like it wasn’t there at all and Stanley wants nothing more but to move them, stretch them out above his head and never hide again. He wonders if this means he can fly now.

“So,” Mike starts, after they’ve both spent way too long looking at them and the wind has become too harsh for Stanley to stand much longer. “You should probably tell the others.” 

Stanley hums. Fixes his shirt and wonders if there’s a way to always have them out. There’s a part of him that feels like his friends should know already. Like they should be able to look at him and be able to tell. The bond that they share. The scars. The knowledge that nothing is ever going to be normal for them. Swallows the idea of saying that down, nods at Mike, wonders how long it will take for him to get home and then how long it will take until he can show them again.

*

By their reactions it feels like maybe he’s telling them he’s going to dye his hair green or get a tattoo not, you know, _I have wings._ Beverly says _huh_ and Bill says _okay_ and Eddie sort of giggles to himself, as if he’s making fun of Stanley but not quite. More like he’s making fun of this happening at all. Over all they make it seem like they’re thinking _okay so we’ll have to deal with this now_ instead of _holy shit he has wings_ which maybe isn’t that different from Stanley’s reaction but he still thinks they should have freaked out more. 

They all go to the quarry to see for themselves though they’d probably believe him even without seeing it, the way they’ve grown to trust each other with anything. He sits on the ground with them stretched out to his sides and feels like he’s never been able to appreciate wind before.

“They’re so pretty,” Eddie says, quietly and Stanley has to stop himself from pressing into Eddie’s side. Everything feels bigger now, the affection he has for his friends, too.

Richie, Stanley realizes when they’ve all had a good look at him and he’s put them back and put on his sweater, isn’t saying anything. No smartass remarks or jokes. It makes him uneasy and most things have stopped affecting him by now so he doesn’t know why this makes his skin crawl but then Ben’s asking him where they go when he’s hiding them and Stanley stops paying attention to Richie.

They go to Richie’s house, afterwards, because his parents will probably be drunk and won’t care about seven young adults in their son’s room talking about things they don’t understand. Last time it was a new video game Bill had bought, this time it’s one of them sprouting wings. Normal high schooler things. You know.

As they’re walking through the door to Richie’s room, Stanley’s hit with the realization that this is his life now. That although they have a list now and he might learn what to do so it wouldn’t hurt or why this is happening at all, he’s not going to get rid of them. 

“It just hit me that I’m fucked,” he tells them and watches all of them turn to him, feels that strange sense of deja vu again, they’re all focused on him. “This is it, guys. _Wings_.”

“We’ll f-figure i-it o-out,” Bill assures him but Stanley’s thinking of wind and the sky and what flying would feel like and the color grey and he doesn’t realize he’s spaced out until Richie speaks from where he’s moved to sit on his bed.

“What if we don’t?” he’s never been one for optimism. “What if we can’t make it go away? What if fucked up shit keeps happening to us and there’s nothing we can do about it?”

“I don’t know,” Stanley answers at the same time as Ben asks:

“Us?” Richie looks at him. Nods and Ben nods back. There’s comfort in knowing his best friends accept his problems as their own but it’s also terrifying. A tree branch taps against Richie’s window. The pain gets stronger.

*

They return to the library. There are words like _nubivagant_ and _aliferous_ and all the stories start to blend together eventually.

Richie asks something as he’s flipping through one of the books. 

“Huh?” Stanley goes but he’s still only half listening. Eddie and Bill are getting coffee across the street and it’s just them two now and there are still so many books to look through and none of them make sense.

“You’re making this harder than it’s supposed to be,” Richie tells him, accusingly. “I asked: are there angels in judaism?” 

“Yeah,” he answers easily, pulls another book to himself. “I doubt that’s it though I’m not-”

“Then did it hurt?” Richie interrupts it. Stanley frowns, looks at him finally. 

“I think we’re having two different conversations,” he tells him. Richie’s watching him, expectant. Stanley wants to give him whatever it is Richie wants but he doesn’t know what it is, goes back to his book.

“Stanley,” Richie whines “Did it hurt?”

“Did _what_ hurt? I don’t know what you’re-”

“When you fell from heaven,” Richie says, finally. There’s a shit eating grin on his face when Stanley looks at him again. He blinks. Sighs.

“I hate you,” he says and Richie keeps grinning, to himself, even after Eddie and Bill are back. The books become harder to focus on.

*

If he keeps them inside for too long he starts tasting blood.

His father watches him leave through the kitchen window. They’ve given up on trying to make him follow their rules. The sky’s dark and inviting and the moment Stanley knows his father can no longer see him, he starts running towards the woods, towards the quarry. The part of him that has always been good at hiding tells him that the quarry is too far from his house, that if he keeps running he won’t have the energy to come back but he’s only thinking about how the pain will go away and his feet seem to be carrying him on their own. 

The wind and the dark and his hair and the jacket he can’t wait to take off. The moonlight. The path he takes through the trees.

He’s out of breath once he reaches the quarry. Can hear the water hitting the rocks but stays away from the edge, just in case. 

He keeps forgetting how big they look against his skinny frame. The cold night air against his chest. He keeps thinking about flying but when he moves them the way he knows birds to do, all he does is cause the dirt to lift from the ground with a gust of wind. Underneath him, the waves run harsher into the rocks. Louder. Stanley closes his eyes. Wraps them around himself to keep warm. Wonders how long he can stay here before he freezes to death. 

And then it seems, almost, like he hears a voice calling his name from the water but when he walks over to the edge to look, he can barely make out the dark blue of the waves and nothing else. 

The lack of sleep will catch up to him soon. The lack of sleep-

He starts to shiver and then the wings start to shake, just a little bit and his heart is suddenly beating way too fast and too slow at the same time and his limbs start feeling too heavy for him. He lets himself fall to the ground and covers his eyes, wraps the wings around himself in a cage of sorts. 

The difference between then and now is that he wasn’t the only one dealing with it last time. The taste of blood in his mouth returns even though the wings aren’t trying to break his spine. There has to be something, he thinks and blacks out. 

He comes to in the back of a car he vaguely recognizes as Bill’s. Someone’s holding his hand and there’s probably a blanket over him or something else soft and warm and from somewhere comes Eddie’s voice:

“This is obviously killing him,” and if they were someone different Stanley would probably laugh at how dramatic it sounds but this is them and this is his body and his pain. He has the sudden urge to apologize but his mouth is dry and his lips won’t move.

“Tough fucking luck because we’re keeping him alive,” Richie answers. He’s probably the one holding Stanley’s hand, cold skin the only thing that doesn’t feel hazy. He blacks out again before they stop. Maybe he falls asleep. It’s hard to tell anymore.

*

He has memories of waking up in the middle of the night in one of his best friends’ rooms, painfully aware that something is missing. Back then, of course, it was as simple as Richie and Beverly getting up to go outside and smoke but there’s something similar he feels now. His body knows before his mind does.

The pendant Richie wears is an almost translucent white gemstone. He keeps putting it between his teeth without realizing and Eddie keeps telling him that’s gross and Richie usually winks or makes a joke about sucking or puts his lips to Eddie’s forehead and laughs way too loudly when Eddie punches him in the stomach. 

They’re alone when he pulls out a small ziplock bag and throws it at Stanley’s chest. It’s almost identical to his in shape but light blue instead.

“What?” Stanley asks blinking at it. He’s sitting on his bed and Richie’s standing in the middle of his room, hands in his pockets.

“Wear it,” he answers simply and turns around on his heel to inspect the pictures Stanley has framed on his cabinet. 

“What?” Stanley repeats because he’s always thought Richie only wore his to look cool.

“It has-” Richie starts to say and stops, turns back to look at Stanley. There’s something there again. Stanley thinks _I should have figured it out already_ and sinks his teeth into the inside of his cheek. Hates feeling like he’s never in control “Just wear it,” and then, raw and earnest, “Trust me.”

So Stanley does. A gemstone against his chest. Richie in front of him. The knowledge that there’s something Richie is trying to tell him.

*

He dreams of water. Of Richie. He dreams of singing.

“Come to me,” Richie says and he’s _in_ the water and Stanley can’t make out anything past his shoulders. Richie’s teeth, when he speaks, seem too sharp but he goes, still, and then he wakes up just before he reaches him, his body submerged in the water to his waist. 

_oh_

*

He never asked them-

There’s no more copper in his mouth and the pain untangles itself from his insides. There’s the feeling of uneasiness, of being incomplete when he can’t have his wings out but there’s no more aching and there’s no more dizziness and the threads start turning visible.

It has, Richie had started to say. He finds gemstone guides in the library.

*

_How did you know to look for me at the quarry?_

Richie keeps showing up in his dreams. Keeps singing.

_Twelve feet above the flood_

and

_One by one the bright birds leave_

and

 _Breathing like the drowning man_

and

“Come to me,” he says in his dreams.

There’s so much water. So much blood. Sharp teeth and feathers and-

 _oh_.

 _Gills_.

“Drown with me,” he says. In his dreams or-

Stanley goes.

*

His father isn’t awake to watch him leave so he starts running as soon as he locks the door. 

Richie’s waiting for him. Just his eyes above the water and his silhouette barely visible in the dark.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks. The water has never looked this inviting before. Richie grins at him, licks the water off his lips before he answers.

“You had to figure it out on your own,” there’s no real explanation behind that but Stanley hums at him, nods. 

“Angelite?” he asks, pulling the pendant out from under his shirt to press it in his hand.

“Mine’s a moonstone,” Richie tells him, swims closer. “Why are you still on the shore?”

“Don’t mermaids eat poor enamored boys?” he asks back and watches Richie laugh, loud, his eyes squeezed shut just for a moment. “How long has it been?”

“Almost a year,” Richie answers, spins around in the water. Stanley blinks. If it was still light, he could see the tail. The fins.

“And I blacked out after two weeks,” _it’s warmer in the water_ his mind supplies. It’s not true but it’s hard not to listen.

“Ben was reading that book about crystals back then,” Richie goes. That’s not a real explanation, again but Stanley can figure it out. 

“So how does it work?”

“I don’t know,” Richie says, maybe quieter than he usually would. Stanley thinks back to when he told them. _What if fucked up shit keeps happening to us and there’s nothing we can do about it?_ “Just get in,” Richie says when Stanley opens his lips to ask more. His voice finds it’s way to Stanley’s bones, pulls him towards the water. He thinks of asking Richie to come to the shore instead but then he’s taking off his shoes and his socks and his jeans and Richie has dived underneath the water but Stanley can still make out the shape of his body in the moonlight.

He takes off his shirt and ignores the urge to let his wings show up. He goes deep enough to start swimming but then Richie is right in front of him.

“It took you so long,” he says. Stanley kisses him.

**Author's Note:**

> richie's singing the drowning man by the cure
> 
> title from roslyn by bon iver and st. vincent
> 
> find me @ birduris.tumblr.com


End file.
